


Black and Blue

by Egon



Series: We Are Monsters [3]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: BDSM, Eye Trauma, Fontcest, Injury to the Eye Motif, Jealous Papyrus, M/M, Multi, POV Second Person, Papyrus POV, Pedophiliac Overtones, Sibling Incest, Suicidal Thoughts, There is a sex dungeon in the basement, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Unhealthy Therapy, Unrequited Love, bdsm relationship, sans pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 18:59:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5881966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Egon/pseuds/Egon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sans makes another visit to Grillby's basement, Papyrus considers his interests.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black and Blue

**Author's Note:**

> Finished February 1, 2016, after this small monster was very sick.

You’ve been here so long that he’s gotten to be a pro at working your body against itself. He knows all of your soft spots, all of your weaknesses. Who else could make so much out of so little to work with? This is a man whose greatest talents lie in whittling a soul down to its lowest, and you give him this, you’re already there. They weren’t kidding; he’s a master, he really is, in his name and everything.

You always thought the secret was his apathy. The impassive way he can hurt someone and not give anything off at all. It’s easy to project whatever you need onto a blank slate. The silence could stretch into loathing or disapproval, disappointment or regret, and those few kinksters who just really got off on not being cared about at all? All up for interpretation. You needed that distraction. You needed to dissect it down to techniques and conditioning. There’s an absolution in tuning out, not having to be so self-aware. But your brain never stops working, never stops thinking, so you can only focus instead on something so banal that it distracts you from bigger, important things: why you’re here, what you’re doing, why you deserve this—

Sometimes, you’re disgusted with yourself for the spineless way you have to change the channel to something more agreeable. True penance is a meditation on your sins, whether considered or acted upon, dolled out by a mediator of punishment and forgiveness. You’ve abdicated your position as judge out of extreme hypocrisy, and you’re contented to let your black garbed executioner mete out punishment to his satisfaction. (And yours.) Then you consider that singular daydream of Papyrus in his position, your self-disgust mirrored on his face in a kind of voiceless outrage, his hands tearing you apart for every moment you ever considered ravaging that purity, and you know it isn’t quite penance that you seek. If it was, you’d imagine the betrayal in his eyes, you’d imagine how it would wound him more than anything else, that innocence crumpled like fallen petals underfoot, fragrant and bruised, instead of the scorn and condemnation of someone who had become wise to the world. In that daydream, you want to see yourself in him, you’re projecting it as both cause and effect, you’re instilling your own shame and desire in the object of desire; just by being the temptation, this daydream is also the revenge. (Should it turn you on so much, that you want Papyrus to hate you ‘like that’, to take Grillby’s place sometimes??? Definitely not.)

It’s not exactly penance, no. It’s an outlet. It’s just enough that it chokes out all other thoughts, until everything narrows into blunt sensation and the stinging nothingness between taps, echoes of noises and vibrations that could be sight or sound or where the two bleed together. Your own breath and heartbeat serve as counter-beat to the meter pounded out on your bones. When you feel like this, you can’t think of him. You can’t think of anything. You only intake and register, a kind of response that is a non-response. It makes you feel dumb. And what you’re doing is moronic in the sense that your life is in someone else’s hands, and it only takes one wrong move just once and—

You wonder if there’s a death-wish hidden in there somewhere. That you’re not strong enough to say ‘kill me kill me kill me kill me I deserve it’, but that one day the two of you will get too comfortable with this arrangement and he’ll slip and sever those ties. And if there isn’t that intention that has you keep coming back for this hungrily, the taste of death on your tongue bitter and fading and gone too quickly like one pomegranate seed at a time, never enough to sate you, never enough to quench you, just enough to make you want it more and more. You were never strong enough to do it yourself; even in this, you are hand-fed by another, the taste of death and eternal punishment. To indulge is nothing more than obscene gratification, and that’s why it hasn’t come to an end. It would be wrong to gorge; he doles it out in increments, and you hate him for that sometimes, that he has the control and you don’t; and you find yourself weeping with gratitude that he took the reins away from you and took the choice away from you, that he’s so cruel and so kind.

What you can do is remind yourself, right up until oblivion, with each lash, with each stinging slap, with each burn: ‘you deserve this’. Every moment of this is a moment you aren’t subverting the law for your own satisfaction. Every moment of this is a moment where Papyrus gets to enjoy a normal life. Every moment of this gives you the strength to deny yourself; every ache an echo, a murmur, a reminder until the ache begins to fade, until the light begins to darken, until you have to come back and have the lessons beaten back into you again.

The secret is that your ‘Master’ is not apathetic in the slightest. Apathy would suggest sloppiness in his gestures. An apathetic Master would not try to impress upon you the aftercare you thoroughly deny yourself — for what would that do but negate the lessons wholesale? (No, your own hands paw at yourself and then that’s called a ‘relapse’, nothing to be proud of—) Or to discuss the measure and form of your punishment. Or to recognize your strengths and weaknesses and eke it all out of you with such proficiency. He’s talented, yes, but.

Here’s your little shame. You’re almost certain it’s not the apathetic blank slate that drives him. It’s just the veneer of it that makes you second-guess yourself at every turn, acknowledging him to be proficient in his craft and yet. And yet. How pathetic is it that you try to project tenderness onto him. You know how the mind tricks itself, and it’s easy to imagine something there that isn’t, if only to fill in gaps. The mind doesn’t like gaps. It doesn’t like uncertainty. It doesn’t like the certainty of gaps and nothingness either. But tenderness? That’s got to be a new low for you. How egotistical: ‘the man who beats you up has a crush on you.’ ‘watching you hurt makes him feel bad.’ ‘he wants to make you feel good too.’

ha ha ha.

ha.

There are so many ways to make you hurt, very easily. It wouldn’t take a lot of effort at all to figure those out. But there are ways to make you hurt in such a different manner, more subtle, longer lasting, new realms of sensations and agonies you wouldn’t even trust yourself to deliver. And he attacks your weak points like a lover. The point of his finger rings the orbit of your eye socket, sweeping along it in a sweet caress before puncturing the magical membrane and plunging your vision into darkness. The pairing of gentleness with pain is disarming and amplifies the effects, not in a way that feels like betrayal, but a way that feels like trust. No one else would think to do that, or if they did, it would be straight through, sharp implement or dull object like the initial puncture would be terrible enough to suit you. The way he trails his hands across your ribcage makes the pain feel like romance in those little moments, those awkward gaps between senseless, endless pain, true abandon. Your brain interprets it as gentility, as wooing. Maybe there’s something to be psychoanalyzed in the way you could do one thing the same way ten times and ten different people can have entirely different feelings about it. In the way that you think, ha, that he’s doing this out of love.

And then there’s the way that he finishes the evenings with your form too exhausted to even bear your own body weight, much less the burdens of the world, and unlocks you from your manacles and rests you down on a little cot, making you feel small and helpless in his arms. And he holds you tight enough that it seems to quell your shuddering. And there’s your soul, ignoring your basic interests to weep and ooze away steadily at what would be basic touch and interaction, but your lousy body interprets as the tender care of someone very close to you. He tilts your head up and helps you drink a cup of water to replenish the fluids you’re losing from your shameful inability to control yourself. Then he offers to help, not so much with words, but with the hesitant way his hands brush against your ribcage and dip inside, the beautiful, warm moment of connection between the pair of you before you can summon the strength to swat him away. You don’t deserve that, you don’t want that from him. He hides that raw look of injury from you as quickly as it reveals itself, ironic and hilarious since you don’t even have the energy to knock a glass of water over, and settles for a kiss to your hands instead, sitting there with you until you can sit up on your own, helping you with your clothes.

In every moment, you kid yourself that there’s something there that definitely isn’t. In every moment, you kid yourself that you could have something that would at least be sort of healthy and definitely a lot more legal. That all you’d have to do was reach for him, and he’d be there, and you could have this for yourself. Like, uh, like he was some kind of reward for not being an outright pedophile or, uh, you know, just trying to manage doing normal people things. Then those moments pass. You know you’ll never be normal, and this will never be normal, and the things he probably wants can’t be all that normal either. Your main connection happens to just be something that’s both intimate and distancing at the same time, just a job, just two roles you happen to fill that require each other to come into effect. What you have will never be what you really want. What he might want. You don’t know. He’s a blank slate, after all. (heh.)

The end of every moonless night has your energy levels tanked in the pleasant kind of way that leaves you collapsing into your mattress with wonderful, dreamless sleep. After all those draining hours of intensity and alternation and breaking down all your barriers, you wonder how much of it’s real, and how much of it is your brain playing catch-up and putting the pieces together from dull, misshapen memories. You do remember a cool washcloth darting between ribs and vertebrae to remove every hint of goo from your body, and light dottings of what you hesitate to call kisses in your weakened, blinded state, and sitting with you silently, warm and comforting, until you have to go home and face your temptations anew. You honestly aren’t sure what you’d do if he wasn’t there, if he didn’t beat some sense into you on the regular. You’re scared to think of what you’re capable of at the worst of times, and eternally grateful for his food and his ear and his brutality at the best. There’s no one better at what he does.

He’s one hell of a bartender.

* * *

There are two types of late nights.

One is the kind where, after your practice, when the bar is closing, you get a phone call. He is the kind of person who always talks in a very measured tone, always very quiet and controlled, always like he is almost scripted. Almost always the same words, or something like those words. And those words say, “Sans has fallen asleep at the bar. Please come pick him up.”

The bar is always still open by the time you arrive. That person is the only thing lighting the place. The sign is off. The curtains are drawn. And that man talks in that low and pleasant voice like he is being very quiet for the sake of Sans’s sleep, even though you are clearly here to wake Sans up and bring him into the cold and the dark when that is what Sans least wants to experience.

The bar is always warm, and there is always a bag of food sitting beside Sans that cannot just be the remains of his meal. There is always enough for you too. There is always a burger in there, or a piece of fish, or a cheese sandwich, or a tuna bun. And it is always ringed with a big heap of steak-cut potato, either fries; or double-fried, battered wedges; or purple or orange. And there is always a small cup of the pickles that Sans told you he makes himself. There is always food for you in that bag, although you have never gone to this man’s place to eat ever, and although you try to make it very clear to him that you do not like him and will not eat the food he has cooked and put in the bag that is definitely for you and definitely for free and definitely out of some kind of pity or gratitude for doing something that is brotherly duty. The food he leaves in that bag for you always makes you a little resentful. It seems like something someone would do to make you like them, and you do not want any reasons to try to like him, or to look bad for not liking him. And looking at that food sometimes makes you feel a little silly for not liking him. Which, of course, makes you not like him more, because you do not like people who make you feel so silly.

The man is always polishing straight-edged glasses that patrons use to drink ginger beer, or root beer, or cream soda, or plumed glasses for the draft beer that he must lug downstairs all on his own because you are not aware of any staff members on any of the times you’ve come to pick Sans up, or delicate wine glasses that he hangs upside down on an overhang close to but not quite over the bar counter itself. You never catch him making up the food or putting it in the bag, which means he very likely does it before he calls you, but the food is always piping hot when you put your hand under the bag. He always makes a show of wrapping up for the night, when it seems clear to you, at this hour, that everything is done or should have been done, and it is only because of his graciousness that Sans is allowed to sleep on the bar counter, basking in his warmth and generosity. And the man always looks so bored doing it, tea towel draped over a hand and handling every piece of glassware as if it were not delicate at all. You don’t like that. Glass has always made you a little anxious, because you are so strong and it is so weak, so a man who cannot respect glass…. No, it is not exactly that he does not respect it, but that he is so used to it that it seems he does not act with much care, or much fear. So. The reason you do not like that is because it makes you feel… inadequate and amateur next to him.

While that person makes it very clear to you in his body language and everything that he would likely rather be doing a hundred different things than waiting around for you to come and take Sans home, he always stays behind the bar and watches you leave, his head tilted strangely, his face completely expressionless, his hands stilling just for the moment it takes you to walk your very tired brother to the door and then exit into the night. You do not enjoy that scrutiny. You do not know what it means. Only that he does it every time. And it makes you wonder. And that wondering makes you uncomfortable again for the same root discomforts that make you want to hit him. Maybe, maybe some part of you sees the way he watches as a claim, and you know that man has no claim at all.

The other kind of night, you do not get called. It stretches late and you come home and make up hot chocolate, and neither Sans nor that person ever bother to check in with you. You sip the hot chocolate and you try to stay up, wondering if he is walking back on his own, wondering what he does on his own. But you are still… unused to staying up so late when you get up so early. You always fall asleep on the couch, hot chocolate crusted at the edges of your mouth and at the bottom of the mug, and when you wake up, Sans is asleep in his room, and there is a blanket draped over you.

You don’t like those nights at all. For starters, those are nights where you do not have stories read to you. Those are nights where Sans does not tuck you in and plant a kiss on your forehead and call you some stupid and terrible nickname and make stupid and terrible jokes until you shriek at him, and you love doing that, and you miss it horribly. Those are nights where there is enough food for four people, and you eat enough for one, and the food on the plate meant for Sans goes cold. You save those meals in tupperware containers in the fridge, and forget to throw them out, because they are reminders of moments when you were away, of moments when he was missing and should not have been. It is not always that you cook too much food. It’s just that a meal and leftovers for the next night seem so mountainous and unbearable eating on your own.

You do not distract yourself on those nights, because you do not want to miss the phone call, hoping, even very late, that the man or your brother might be calling: ‘I am alright. The storm is bad. I am staying with Doggo.’ Even that would be preferable. But you’ve known for a while, or you have guessed and felt for a while, subconsciously, that it is just the same as those nights where you are called to retrieve him. That on those cloudless, clear nights, when the air is crisp and the snow is louder than normal under your feet, he is still at that bar, basking in that man’s warmth, smiling for that man’s smile.

You are not exactly proud of what you did. But you had to do it, at least at some point. You had to be certain. So you waited, and waited, and when the hour passed and you had not been called — and you were always called at close to the same time, so you knew when he closed, and you knew what his rhythm was — then you prowled out of your home and watched through the window. A quiet conversation, finishing a drink from the curved glass intended for alcoholic beverages, leaning in conspiratorially, then that person taking his hand, hanging up the towel and half-apron, leading him down the stairs to the basement, all of this well-lit by his glow.

And neither of them called. You waited for almost a full hour in the dark, huddled by that front door, hoping that you would not be seen as a criminal character, hoping that they would return soon, and that it was only something silly… But they did not. And the longer you waited, the more you understood. When you woke up on that couch, late into the day, draped in the blanket, you felt sick. You wanted to ascend the stairs, check on him, shake him, ask him why and how and when and so many questions that you did not want to be answered. You stayed downstairs. Maybe he might wonder why there wasn’t another container of food he did not eat and would not eat. Maybe he might wonder why there wasn’t a mug of hot chocolate emptied beside you, chocolate crust on your mouth in that childish manner that now makes you loathe yourself for it. You know he won’t wonder if you wonder why he doesn’t come home with food those nights, and that should have been a much bigger tip-off to you.

He has probably been doing this for a while. He probably expects you to be guileless and innocent, uncomprehending of the way the world works and the ways people lie to each other. Your footsteps would have been swept by wind and snow, your nocturnal spying a secret to them. You are now keeping secrets from each other. Wonderful. But the alternative? You can’t do it. You just can’t. You can only hate from afar, silent and validated by the truth of the matter, blaming this ever-growing distance between your brother and you on the horrible person taking him away from you. The seed of hatred has plenty of room to grow in your chest. Your heart was too large and too full for there not to be. Sans is too precious, means too much, is… is more special than this person could ever know or deserve.

The juxtaposition has revealed something quiet and raw; you know this about yourself now by the negatives: ‘not having’, ‘not being with’, ‘not in love’. It’s “not” fair that you should learn about hurting like this because no one has done anything to you at all. It’s “not” fair that you should learn about loss like this when you are still here, and he is too, and the ‘going away’ is in a different form that you can’t just describe in physical terms. What they are doing must be physical, but the widening gaps between you are “not” in that same strange antithetical fashion you’re still struggling to integrate into your terms. You are losing your brother, maybe. He has been gone for a while, definitely. They have been together like this for a while, impossible but true, under your very nose, unmentioned, unseen. But this…. it can’t last forever. It can’t. You won’t let it.


End file.
